ION Digital

Q: Why did you write this book? What possessed you?

A: In April 2008, James Buck posted a single-word tweet “arrested.” He was being taken to an Egyptian jail. Because of that post he would be released and sent home in about a day. It blew me away and I posted someone should write a book about the incident. Someone tweeted back, “how about you?” That started a process that became Twitterville. So the credit goes to either James Buck or the Egyptian police, depending on how you look at it.

Q: What was different about writing Twitterville vs  Naked Conversations (ex: completely unchartered territory back then, easier/harder to write?)

A: Naked Conversations was written a time when the essential business message was that the time of excessive marketing needed to end. Twitterville was written at a time when what business needed was increased marketing efficiency.

In both cases, the solution was social media. But you are right. Back in 2005, it was just blogging and its influence stopped at the gates of most powerful institutions.

It’s not just blogging anymore. A whole cyber toolshed of social media tools has evolved. And most business have begun to see that essential reasons why they need to use them.

Hopefully this means there will be more people who want to read Twitterville than there were for Naked Conversations. We’ll see in a very short time.

As far as collaborating with Scoble, working with one of the guys that first figured out how social media will change business was a huge asset. Having Robert as a co-author gave me access to everyone in social media at the time. It certainly increased publisher interest in the book. Robert is the person who got me to see just how significant and fundamental social media would become.

So in one way I missed Robert for this project. In others, I really wanted to try doing a book on my own. I’ll soon find out whether or not that was a wise course. So far the reviewers have been pretty kind.

Q: What surprised you most as you got deeper into Twitter (research)?

A: What surprised me most was the generosity of the crowd. Over three quarters of the stories in Twitterville were suggested to me by people who suggested them to me.

The second biggest surprise was the diversity of how Twitter is being used in businesses–business of all kinds and sizes.

Q: Many people see Twitter as an alien planet, while you say Twitter is like a neighborhood, and it “lets us behave online as we do in real life.” Can you elaborate?

A: I don’t know about those people who see Twitterville as an alien planet. I spent most of my last year listening to people who told me how Twitter could make this planet better.

Twitter lets people interact more like we do in real life than any social media tool that has preceded it. In business, we rarely start a conversation with: “Well, are you going to buy something?” We start with little spoonfuls of chatter about the weather, about last week end, even about what you ate in a certain restaurant. Sometimes it evolves and sometimes it was just a pleasant moment of chatter.

Twitter brings a more naturally human interaction to social media than those that preceeded it. When you think about it, social media has people interacting with each other in spaces that are not real. But the results are relationships that are quite real.

Twitter accomplishes that faster, easier and more naturally. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Q: At one point you quote a guy saying, “Twitter is the new Google.” What makes you think a company with no reported profits could take on one of the world’s most powerful tech companies?

A: You are referring to James Governor, the founder of Redmonk, an open source analytical group. He was referring specifically to the fact that more people are finding greater value in getting answers from people on Twitterville than spiders crawling Google data.  It had nothing to do with Twitter taking on Google or business models. But I would point out that
Google was a company that was severely criticized for having no business model when it was Twitter’s age.

In both cases I would argue, that the companies  did have business models. They just had not shared them with you or me.

Q: If books like Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations conveyed messages such as “Markets are conversations”, what is the message of Twitterville?

A: Charlene Li said it in her foreward to Twitterville.”Twitter is a marketplace.” The rest of the book tells you stories about how over 100 businesses and organizations have used Twitter to successfully conduct marketplace conversations.

Q: How do you see this playing out for communications professionals (marketing, PR, etc), many of whom are trying to make the leap to social communications?

A: We are in an extremely transformational time. The economy is shifting marketplace behavior for one. For another, new tools are moving  the marketplace from one-directional Broadcast into two-directional conversational. This changes a great deal. It makes geography less of a business barrier. It allows people to influence each other on what to buy, listen to or watch than advertising possibly could and at a much lower business cost.

This should be a great time for communications professionals. If they are good at their professions, then  they should be good at conversations. They are no longer professional relegated to stand behind the ear of some executive spokesperson. They can speak themselves.

They can show their own personal knowledge and passion.

There are so many examples of communications practititoners who have emerged in reputationbecause of social media. Steve Rubel, Shel Holtz, Brian Solis, Phil Gomes, Kami Huyse, Chris Heuer, Geoff Livingstone…It’s a really long list. It’s just as long on the corporate side, but the names may not be as prominent–yet.

My advice to communications professionals is to follow what these folk do and say.

Understand that conversations are not pitches. Understand your value can be as much about what you hear and report to companies as it is what you say.

Q: Where do you see Twitter going from here? (moving into new technologies, being acquired, etc).
A: My focus is neither future technologies nor business transactions. I am much more interested in the stories of how social media tools improve business situations for companies and customers.

The book tells the stories of how people  used Twitter in the hope that readers will get  ideas for themselves. I see Twitter  becoming  an everyday business communications tool like the telephone or email. The Twitter story will  become a lot less dramatic and a lot more normal.

Q:Is there anything else you would have liked to cover?  What are you going to do now (any new books on the horizon)?

A: I am always thinking of new books. I wrote a chapter in Twitterville called “Braided Journalism.” It’s about the convergence in social media of traditional and citizen journalism. It tells the story of people like Janis Krums, who took the iPhone photo of US AIR #1549 landing on the Hudson and of Mumbai and Gaza.

A:The world will not be a better place if  traditional news organizations do not survive. The established media needs fully follow its readership migrations from the news pages into social spaces.

Some see social media as the killer of traditional media. I see it as essential to any possible solution. We tweeters and bloggers are the feet on the streets of the world and the solution to media problems.